


The Ancient Conflict

by PrairieDawn



Series: The Intelligence Catastrophe [1]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Apparently I think I'm Carl Sagan or something, Fake Nonfiction, Gen, I promise I'm not abandoning the series people actually like, Imaginary Physics, Meta, Metastatic Headcanon, Other, Plotless Infodumping, Pretentiousness, They must have lower standards in the future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 17:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12988704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: This is not a story in the traditional sense.  It is the introduction to a series of essays written from an in-universe perspective concerning the relationship between consciousness and reality within the Star Trek universe and by extension, any universe whose existence depends on and responds to consciousness and will.  It is not intended to describe the real world, though I do borrow from, and often butcher, real world physics, biology, and theology.I'm listing these as elements in a series rather than as chapters because some topics might be less uninteresting to readers than others.





	The Ancient Conflict

**Author's Note:**

> This is just the introduction. Eventually I imagine this whole series as a bunch of essays written by different imaginary people, possibly experimenting with the styles of some of my favorite nonfiction science writers, including Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Natalie Angier, Oliver Sachs, and so forth, because I like that sort of thing.
> 
> If you read nonfiction for fun, you might find this tolerable. Otherwise it's just a place to store my increasingly rococo Stage 4 metastatic headcanons.
> 
> Feel free to steal and use in any universe with a nonzero bias coefficient (all universes with magical or paranormal elements). I do like to get citations though.
> 
> Comments more than welcome. Feel free to argue with me about canon or fanon. You probably won't change my mind, but arguing can be amusing.

After the fires of the Big Bang cooled, the first generation of stars built simple atoms of hydrogen into over a hundred elements and cast those elements across the galaxies, seeding the universe with the building blocks of worlds and life. Later, new stars formed, providing homes for life to take root and grow. For much of that time, the universe wasn’t entirely real. It existed as a set of infinite possible universes, some more probable, some less. Then life learned to perceive the universe, and waves of probability began to collapse into islands of reality around each living being.

The universe is a weaving of space and time, matter and energy, knowledge and intention. It is literally held together and made real by the living minds that are born to it. The history of the universe is driven by an ancient conflict, not between great races, but between the laws of physics and the laws of biology, or more specifically, between the second law of thermodynamics and the law of evolving systems.

The low energy state for the sum total of universes is for all probability waves, or virtual events, to be resolved into real events. As the universe seeks to increase its reality, it nurtures the birth of observers, beings like us who turn our eyes to the world around us and seek to make sense of it. It also seeks to bind each observer into agreement with all others, the better to solidify its own reality. It is this trend that leads to the gradual, inevitable movement away from singular, organic, corporeal entities and toward a network of connected, powerful, noncorporeal entities that shape the large scale structure of space and time in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Biology, and evolution in particular, seeks nothing except for sex and not dying. Bodies require matter to build themselves and energy to move and live. We require sensory systems that help provide us with access to matter and energy sources, that warn us of danger so we don’t die too soon, and that lead us to each other for sex so we can make babies before we die. We have absolutely no biological interest in becoming transcendent noncorporeal immortals--in becoming anything, really, because evolution cannot anticipate the future--and yet, the nature of the universe drags us out of our solitary, solid bodies, species by species, kicking and screaming if necessary.

This set of essays seeks to explain the conflict between biology and physics and how it plays out from the smallest scales, from lost children, to soul’s companions, to the fight to preserve ourselves after death, to the largest scales in the fate of worlds, galactic civilizations, and the universe itself. We begin with the physics of layered space, the particles and forces that travel the several branes that coexist in this reality, and with the relationship between consciousness, space, and time. We will then discuss the laws of biology, the mathematical rules that allow complexity to grow from simplicity given energy and sufficient time, and how the birth of consciousness is only one of many events that put physics into conflict with biology. Then we will discuss esper functions as experienced by our kind of life in more detail, examining how biological and cultural systems have solved the problem of connected minds housed in brains that evolved in solitude. We will look at several examples of mature cultures that have solved this problem in very different ways. Finally, we will look at the patterns of emergent esper function in those cultures which have not yet adapted to it effectively, and determine whether there are best practices for allowing species and cultures to adapt to the requirements of trophic physics without wholly losing their identities in the process. We will also examine cautionary tales of what can happen when a culture fails to adapt.

We hope that these essays will entertain those with an interest in how our presence as intelligent beings shapes the universe. We are, ourselves, a diverse group, including a Vulcan particle physicist, a Terran evolutionary biologist, a physician and herald from the growing community of worldless Federation explorers, a Bajoran theologian, a Betazoid psychohistorian, and others. We have included stories from our own lives and research where possible.

The history of the universe is the history of matter and energy becoming life, life becoming mind, and mind reaching out to know the universe of which it is made. We are all privileged to be part of this great exploration.


End file.
